Blogging Journalists, Journalistic Blogging

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Lex Boon, whose focus is on the changing context for journalism in this transitional phase. In particular, blogs have been driving this change, and as a result, of course, journalists themselves have also started their own blogs.

Lex examined media blogs (in the professional context of journalism, published on the Website of news organisations), and interviewed the journalist-bloggers behind them – from a broad range of news beats. Mostly those journalists essentially fell into blogging: their editors raised the need to start blogging, and they started their blogs as experiments, without much pre-planning. This also means that they’re not taking their approach to blogging too seriously at this point.

What they enjoyed about this experience was the comparative freedom: no deadlines, no requirements to cover specific stories, and an ability to include stories and other materials in a broad variety of formats. Indeed, what emerged from Lex’s study were three types of activity: journalists blogging (publishing journalistic stories on their blog), blogging journalists (blogging about news in a non-journalistic style), and the journalistic blog (a use of blogs to support more mainstream journalistic activity, through background information and discussion).

This latter model, in fact, can be seen as an attempt to reclaim journalistic authority online: it provides a direct relationship with audiences, offers an opportunity to include more multimedia material, enables them to work more transparently, and allows them to establish a (personal) brand. Ultimately, this is still seen as journalism; journalistic conventions still remain in play, and continues to generate tension – but the blogging form and format legitimates the sometimes non-mainstream content published there.

The benefits of developing such a direct relationship with readers also include having access to new sources and ideas (as well as exposing journalists to criticism, which is seen by some as a positive, too). But ultimately it’s the freedom of publication which is most appreciated by the journalistic bloggers; in this, they work quite similarly to other, non-official bloggers.